ABOUT
I spent decades thinking I knew what made leaders successful.
Early in my career, I believed business success came down to intelligence and knowledge. Learn the business inside and out, understand the numbers, make smart decisions — and great results would follow. That's what I thought.
I was completely wrong.
Through nearly 30 years in corporate finance — CFO roles, board seats, scaling companies, navigating IPOs and acquisitions — I kept seeing the same pattern. Smart, capable people with all the right information who still couldn't get their teams to perform. Including, at times, me.
The turning point came during an interview process for a CFO position. As part of it, I underwent psychometric testing. When I started the job and received the results, nothing in the report surprised me — I already knew those things about myself. But what changed was understanding how those traits landed with the people around me. How my wiring affected my leadership. That awareness, and the follow-up work that came with it, proved more valuable than anything else I'd done to develop as a leader.
That's why I founded Lucentra Leadership. Because insight alone is interesting — but it doesn't change anything. Impact does.
THE BACKGROUND
I began my career in investment banking at Lehman Brothers and audit at KPMG, then spent the better part of three decades in corporate finance leadership. I was CFO and EVP at Centurion Health, where we scaled the company more than seven times to over $1.5 billion before a successful sale to Centene. Before that, I led CFO teams across multiple Medicaid plans at UnitedHealth Group, and held a series of finance roles at Amerigroup — where I supported the company's IPO.
I hold an undergraduate degree in finance, accounting, and economics from the University of Virginia, and an MBA from the University of North Carolina. I'm a CPA (inactive), a certified executive coach through the Center for Executive Coaching, a member of the International Coaching Federation, and a certified practitioner of both PXT Select and Checkpoint 360.
If any of this resonates, let's talk. Book a discovery call.
